God’s attributes
Have you ever thought about God and wondered, “Why is He so complicated?”
Well, the fact is He isn’t. God, being pure spirit, is utterly simple. God is the fullness of perfection, and therefore has no parts and does not change. If He could change, He wouldn’t be perfect, because a change implies movement either from a state of lesser perfection to greater (improvement) or from greater perfection to lesser (deterioration or degradation). But God is simply perfect, and so can never be either more or less perfect than He already is. So He cannot change.
To understand how a spirit can have no parts, you only have to realize that it is completely immaterial. Try this: think of an idea (any idea on any topic). Now, what part of that idea forms the idea’s boundary? OK? What are its dimensions & how does it work? Or is there one corner of the idea that isn’t touching the center of the idea? Get it? These questions make no sense, right? They don’t apply to ideas because ideas don’t have parts. Neither do spirits. (The big difference between an idea and a spirit is that a spirit is a person that possesses an intellect and a will, and it controls both. An idea is not a person but merely a function of an intellect and cannot control itself, but is controlled by the person who generated it.) The only other major hurdle I can see regarding the nature of spirits is to understand how a being can be considered living without having a material body. But that is a discussion for another time.
God isn’t big or small, fast or slow, old or young. He simply is. That’s why the best way to describe Him—the best name we can give Him—is the name He gave to Himself: “I am who I am” (Ex 3:14). We know from this that He is a living and personal entity, not an impersonal “force,” (and so can identify Himself as “I”) and that He exists outside of time (with its relations of past and future) and is therefore eternal (everything to Him is present, now—“am”—not was or will be, but only am). And He is the only being who fits this description, since there can only be one eternal, infinite and perfect thing (if there were two, for example, there would be some sort of “boundary” separating or distinguishing the two, which would be a limit, so by that fact they wouldn’t be infinite).
The reason He seems complicated to us is that we are so limited that we can only understand Him by mentally dividing up His divine essence into individual attributes and looking at them one at a time. (Not that they are actually separate from one another, they are actually all the same thing—they are God—but this is too much for our created intellects to grasp.) And so in order to understand anything about Him we have to study these attributes individually, and then try to understand how they aren’t really separate or opposed to one another at all, but actually all simultaneously and integrally the same thing—God Himself.
God’s justice and mercy
So we can take two of these attributes, which we recognize as good things, and say that God is both infinitely and perfectly just, and infinitely and perfectly merciful (all of His attributes are infinite [without limit] and perfect [impossible to improve upon]). To our human way of understanding things, justice is usually viewed as something harsh—punishment for wrongdoing—and mercy as somehow opposed to it—softening or taking away from real justice. But God’s justice really is merciful, and because of His infinite love for us, His mercy really is justice.
At the end of time (as-we-know-it), there will only be heaven and hell. Heaven is defined as eternal life with God, and hell is eternal “life” [conscious existence] without God. In the end, each created spirit will be in one or the other of these “places.” (We can’t really imagine what heaven or hell will be like (1 Cor 2:9), since time-and-space-as-we-know-them will have passed away (2 Pet 3:10). They probably won’t be places like places on earth, but rather conditions or states of being which are determined by each spirit’s own attitude toward and relationship with God and the other spirits He created. The holy ones (the ones who love God) and the reprobate (the ones who reject God) will somehow be invisible to each other and incapable of either interacting with each other or changing their respective states from one to the other, so for all intents and purposes they may just as well be in completely different places.)
The angels will remain as they have always been since the moment of their creation (incorporeal beings with intellect and will) and the human souls will be reunited with their human bodies (which will have been transformed into incorruptibility). Those in heaven will enjoy eternal bliss and those in hell will experience eternal torment. The exact nature of this bliss and torment has not been revealed to us (hell has been described as an unquenchable fire; that may be just a metaphor, or maybe not), and it will probably be as individuated to each person as his experiences were on earth. What has been revealed is that they will be beyond anything we can imagine in this life.
Now, each human person alive today can choose either to believe that revelation or disbelieve it. But given the stakes, are you really willing to risk the loss of bliss beyond measure and end up in torment beyond measure if you choose disbelief and then turn out to be wrong? It boggles my mind to think that there are actually people who, after hearing the gospel message, decide to “take their chances” and live like there is no God, that this present existence is all there is and they can live as they please, and that there will be no hell to greet them when they die. Call me a coward, but I’m not willing to risk it. I am content to sacrifice a little pleasure and submit to a little pain and humiliation in the here-and-now in exchange for just the possibility of heaven on the other side of the door of death.
God’s perfect justice will ensure that those who can’t stand the idea of spending eternity with Him will have someplace else to spend their eternity. And that’s also a mercy, giving them exactly what their hearts desire. But those who would rather be with Him, He will gather to Himself. By our sins, we deserve hell; that’s justice, because any offense against the Eternal deserves eternal separation from Him. But in His mercy, He chose to take upon Himself the eternal penalty for our sins in the Sacrifice of love in the Person of His Son. In justice, only an eternal Person could adequately compensate for an eternal penalty. In His human nature, He returned to humanity the possibility of eternal life with Him. All we have to do is choose to serve Him in this life, and ask for His mercy for our sins, submitting to the operation of His grace.
